Advisors: Why You Need to Lead by Example

I know I’ve talked to you before about the idea of being open-handed with your business. It’s one of the core values of my team.

One of the ways we ask our clients to be open-handed is to provide valuable content in their articles – not just surface level ideas, but concepts people can actually apply to their lives.

At first, it seems like a really bad idea to just give away your own thoughts. “People need to pay me for this stuff!” I get it. And you’re right. They should.

But you should know that offering people valuable information creates a willingness in the reader to give you something in return. Sometimes it’s their email address, sometimes it’s their assets to manage. It just depends on how much trust you’ve created with them.

Sure, some people might just take your information and manage their assets all on their own, but those people were never going to be your client anyway.

Even more people get worried about the competition – the people who might steal, or at least copy. Many advisors can be very concerned that other advisors will steal their content and/or ideas. The truth is, you can’t prevent that across the board.

And we would encourage you not to worry about it (of course you should protect your intellectual property). The competition might do something very, very close to what you are doing, but they won’t be you.

This morning, I stumbled upon an article about this very idea. Here at the Mineral office, we couldn’t live without Slack for our internal communications. Microsoft is jumping into the team communications sphere, and Slack took the opportunity to welcome them to the industry. At first, I thought Slack was about to troll Microsoft, but what I found instead was a great example of open-handed thinking.

And do you know what Slack’s open-handedness did for me? It made me like Slack even more. The people who are following you will feel the same way about you when your hands are unclenched and open to possibilities.